The Affluenza Epidemic of 2015

Oct 21, 2015

RUSH: The UK Guardian story: “Wealth Therapy Tackles Woes of the Rich: ‘ItÂ’s Really Isolating to Have Lots of Money’.” UK Guardian. “It’s a rainy Wednesday morning and Clay Cockrell is sitting in his office at Columbus Circle across the street from 1 Central Park West, which houses Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.

“Dressed in comfortable pants and a flannel shirt, Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker turned therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a confidante and counsellor to some of the New YorkÂ’s wealthiest. ‘I shifted toward it naturally,’ he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. ‘We are trained to have empathy, no judgment and so many of the uber wealthy — the 1% of the 1% — they feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.’

“And as they stroll through Manhattan, what issues are AmericaÂ’s 1% struggling with? There is guilt over being rich in the first place, he said. There is the feeling that they have to hide the fact that they are rich. And then there is the isolation — being in the 1%, it turns out, can be lonely. It seems F Scott Fitzgerald was right, the very rich ‘are different from you and me’. Especially in 2015.”

If you’re rich, you don’t have any friends. If you are rich, you don’t have anybody that you have anything in common with. It’s really, really hard to be rich, because everybody’s gunning for you. Everybody wants what you have. Nobody appreciates how you got it. Nobody has any respect for the effort you put into to get it. All they want is what you’ve got and then if you don’t give it to ’em, you’re the one mean and miserly. It’s a lonely existence.

“‘The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality, but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative. ItÂ’s an -ism,’ said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. ‘I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but … it really is making value judgment about a particular group of people as a whole.'”

Wow. Did you ever, ever think that somebody would get close to comparing the uber-wealthy to minorities discriminated against because of their race? Right there in the UK Guardian, the rich are becoming more and more isolated. They’re not allowed to talk about their money, it’s not polite to talk about it. They can’t brag about their achievements. They’re not given credit for what they’ve pulled off. There’s nobody that can relate to them. All anybody wants from them is money. “It’s much more socially acceptable to say: ‘I am broke. Things are hard.’ You canÂ’t say: ‘I have a ton of money,'” and have people leave you alone.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We foretold this problem, being wealthy, many, many moons ago here on the EIB Network.

(playing of spoof)

RUSH: We we got a story like this. The left was putting out stories about how guilt-ridden people were over having a lot of money, and that’s what happens. I’m convinced why a lot of wealthy people end up talking liberalism is because it keeps people off their backs, and some of them do have legitimate guilt. “Gee, I wish more people had as much money as I do. I would be more fun. I feel kind of odd.” And so they become liberal or talking liberal as a means of keeping critics off their back or assuaging their own guilt.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here Bob in Coral Springs, Florida. Bob, great to have you, glad you waited, and nice to have you. Hi.

CALLER: (muffled) Thank you, Rush, and I’m proud to have you as a nearby neighbor. Trust me, I live in Broward County, and I don’t have anybody like you near me. (chuckles)

RUSH: (laughing) Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: My reason for calling — and I’m not gonna apologize for going back a couple of seconds. But when you were talking about how Bernie Sanders and whatever attacking the rich? I just got a new customer. I got a new contract for building eight, 120-foot yachts. Each one of those yachts is well over a hundred thousand man-hours just to assemble it. So my position is, “I love the rich.” I’m self-employed; I don’t get jobs from poor people. I only get jobs when rich people spend money. You know, I’m sure people trash on you about your jet, but they don’t think about the man-hours that it takes to maintain that thing, the pilot, the people you employ. Liberals gotta start thinking about what the effect that they’re talking about. If the government sends them money, they’re just gonna give it away. They’re not gonna produce anything.

RUSH: Obviously.

CALLER: If you allow the rich people to just spend their money and have a good time, it’s beautiful. I love rich people!

RUSH: Well, the Democrat Party, in its current incarnation, is rooted in class envy and exploitation. And they are feeding… They’re presiding over one of the worst economies in peacetime that we’ve had. There is no recovery. We are not creating jobs. We’re losing jobs. In fact, try this story. This is in the Stack unrelated to politics. Washington Free Beacon. This is stunning. Listen. “There are 6,455,300 more students with bachelorÂ’s degrees today than jobs available for them, including jobs that would be created in the next seven years,” and do you know where these numbers come from?

The Regime.

They come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics. Now, we’ve got 94 million Americans not working. The Regime tells us the unemployment rate is 5.1%. This is an out-and-out lie, or misrepresentation. We know that people are being forced into part-time hours because of Obamacare. We know that Obamacare is collapsing. They don’t even have half of the projected sign-ups that they thought they would have by now. Obamacare co-ops are closing and going out of business. Exchanges are in big trouble.

There is no economic recovery.

There is no economic activity.

You know it when you see it. You feel it when it’s happening. None of it is. You can’t see it, you don’t feel it, because there isn’t any. The Millennials don’t have career jobs to go to. It’s tougher and tougher to find jobs, period. There’s a sense all over the country that things are not right. People may not be able to put their finger on what or why, but things aren’t right. Even the people who are working are scared they’re gonna lose their jobs. Even people who have decent incomes are worried and frightened they’re going to lose it.

Even those that you would consider to be secure or those you would consider to be well off, they are worried that it could all go “Poof!” because there isn’t any solid foundation underneath us. Every day you’re treated to stories about companies laying people off here or there — and the immigration that’s happening all over the world, the producing countries are being flooded with people who do not produce. And they’re making demands, entitlement-type demands. And there’s a cumulative effect on people with all of this news, and it adds up to things aren’t right. This is one of the major things that both parties in Washington have, I think, no clue about. Routinely we hear from Obama and other Democrats about how great they are, how well they’ve done with the economy and the recovery.

And we know they’re lying, but do they? What they don’t understand is, what they don’t know, what they don’t get, because they’re not living it. I mean, these worries and fears do not exist inside the Beltway. The employment rate there it is 3%. The median income, six figures inside the Beltway. The average income, six figures. The rest of the country is nowhere near that. Inside the Beltway they all have great pensions or they all have great retirement plans or whatever, and none of ’em are threatened, because they’re all backed by the federal government or corporations that are intact and doing well within the Beltway and with work that comes commissioned by the government. And the thing they don’t understand inside the Beltway is the fear.

There’s genuine worry. The just unstoppable tide of illegal immigration, for one thing it has, if nothing else, a subliminal effect on some. People do not see themselves getting raises. They see their taxes remaining the same or going up. There’s a new fee here, a new fee there. People who have signed up for Obamacare are learning how much new money they have to spend on health care that they used to not have to spend. Not just on their premiums and not just on the deductible, but the actual cost of day-to-day treatment. There’s a palpable fright out there among people, even those who are doing well that it could all go poof, or be taken away from them.

Now, to be honest, there’s some of that all the time. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who acquire big money for the first times in their lives who think it’s all gonna be taken away from them before they die. It’s an interesting phenomenon, but it exists. But this is not that. I mean, this is just standard, ordinary, everyday people who haven’t been fired, haven’t been laid off, and they’re not really threatened with that but they still worry it’s gonna happen.

There’s an unsettledness out there. And when you have 6,455,000 more students with college degrees than there are jobs available for them, how in the world does the same government report an unemployment rate of 5.1%? The number of Americans who hold bachelor’s degrees now in their working years exceeds the number of jobs created by 2022. These are government projections for college degrees by six and a half million.

In other words, the government says that there are six and a half million fewer jobs than there are college graduates by the time we get to 2022. And that does not include any factor regarding global warming and the effect that it has on the job market. I’m just kidding. Now, before I go, he alluded to people sliming my jet. I’m not aware of that. Have you seen any of that? He must be spending time on Twitter. If there’s any of that going on, it’d be in that sewer.